


Inevitable

by clairevergreen



Series: Claire Evergreen's Next Generation [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: HPFT, F/M, Fluff, Harry Potter Next Generation, LGBTQ Character, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 02:54:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6452638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clairevergreen/pseuds/clairevergreen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some things that are just meant to happen.</p>
<p><em>Companion piece to</em> DMF</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inevitable

For some reason, Al had always ignored everyone when they told him working at the Ministry would be the most boring job of his life. Sure, there were some jobs that he figured that would make you want to pull your brains out through your ears, but he didn’t want those. Ever since Uncle Percy had let it slip that they were adding a new Department of Magical Innovation, he and Rose both had their hearts set on joining the minute they got out of Hogwarts. He had slaved over his N.E.W.T.s to get the required grades and by some miracle the department accepted his application to be the newest Junior Researcher under one of the most prestigious magical innovators in the Ministry.

He should have listened to everyone else.

All of his dreams of inventing the newest spell or finally figuring out how to get their damn electronic alarm clocks to work at Hogwarts had been dashed the second he stepped foot into Artemis Farnick’s office. Instead of working side by side with the brilliant witch, he and Rose were shipped off to the patent office, forced to spend day after day surrounded by stacks of papers that mocked him and his lack of time to do anything that remotely resembled the accomplishments of the witches and wizards listed on the applications.

It was rare for anyone to actually come into his office unless they were dropping off more papers for him to look over, so when his door opened, he didn’t even bother to look up, just cleared a space on his desk just big enough to put down the stack. When he didn’t hear any footsteps and the load of work was not deposited on his desk, he paused in his writing.

_Oh, shit, what’d I do now_ , he thought, bracing himself for whatever lecture Artemis had decided to give him that day. When he looked up, it wasn’t the plump, dark haired woman standing in his doorway, but a tall, blond haired boy that was all too familiar to him.

“Hey, Scorp,” Al said slowly, racking his brain to try to figure out why he would show up at work on a random Tuesday.

_Were we supposed to have lunch? Did something happen to Lyra? Did something happen to Rose? Oh shit something happ—_

“Are you busy right now?” Scorpius asked, shifting from one foot to the other as he stood in the doorway.

Al shook his head, immediately shoving the applications he was working on over on his desk, almost knocking a stack over in the process. “No, no, come in,” he said, internally wincing at how awkward and formal he sounded. _It’s not like you’ve been friends since you were eleven, idiot_ , he thought as he jumped up to pull all the disputed contracts off of the only other place to sit in the office.

Scorpius sat down, rubbing his arms and looking at everything in the room but the boy in front of him. Al frowned as he sat back down, leaning forward and resting his crossed arms on the desk in front of him. The awkwardness in the room was so thick that he felt like he could cut it with a quick Severing Charm and he had absolutely no clue how to go about fixing that.

_Fuck, Louis was always better at this_ , he thought as he tried to figure out what to say. “Are you okay?” he finally said, trying to meet Scorpius’s gaze. As he spoke, Scorpius looked over and, try as he might, Al couldn’t read the expression on his friend’s face. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.

Scorpius looked down, fidgeting with his hands. “Yeah,” he said after a minute. “I mean, maybe. I don’t know.” He looked up at Al again, this time tugging at the hem of his shirt. Al was about to ask what he meant when Scorpius continued, “Rose just broke up with me.”

Whatever Al had expected him to say, that was not it. “She what?” was the eloquent response that was the first thing that came to mind and judging by the look on Scorpius’s face, it was most definitely not the thing he was supposed to say. “Did—did she say why?” Al asked quickly, trying to get his thoughts straight.

Scorpius shrugged and now that he knew what was going on, Al could clearly tell how much it was bothering his friend. Normally Scorpius was the animated one of the group, second only to Louis in how outgoing and overbearing he was. He always talked with his hands and on more than one occasion, had accidentally knocked drinks and people over while drunk and Lyra had to physically pull him out of harm’s way. The person sitting in front of Al couldn’t have been any more different, staring down at his lap and looking like he was trying to make his six-foot frame look as small as possible.

“You know how Rosie is,” Scorpius said finally, pulling Al out of his speculations. “I walked in and asked her if she was ready to go to lunch and she just looked me in the eye and said she wasn’t sure if we should continue seeing each other ‘in a romantic way.’” He looked up at the last few words and rolled his eyes, the normal Scorpius slowly coming back.

“Jeez, Rose,” Al mumbled under his breath as he leaned back in his seat, running his hands through his slightly unkempt hair. “Is that all she said?” he asked louder, trying to gauge how badly Scorpius was taking everything. There was something not quite right about his reaction, but Al couldn’t put a finger on it.

Scorpius nodded. “Basically, yeah,” he said, falling quiet as soon as he was done. Al opened his mouth to say something else, but quickly closed it, not knowing what to say.

They sat there in the quiet for a good minute before an idea popped into Al’s mind. “Let’s go out tonight,” Al said suddenly, earning a look from Scorpius. “No, seriously. We’ll grab Louis and go to the Hippogriff and get your mind off of the whole thing.” He had no idea where the suggestion had come from, but his gut was telling him that there was something else going on that Scorpius wasn’t telling him. Going out to the pub was the only way he could think of to get him to spill.

Scorpius sighed, running his hand through his hair. “Fine,” he relented, standing up and shoving his hands into his pockets. “I’ll come, but I’m not going to be bailing Louis out of anywhere if he gets in trouble.” Al was about to say something when he saw the smile on Scorpius’s face. Al shook his head and the two of them quickly agreed on a time before Scorpius left to get back to his classes. As the door closed behind Scorpius after he promised not to blow off their plans, it suddenly occurred to Al why he was so bothered by his friend’s reaction.

Scorpius hadn’t even been remotely upset.

 

***

 

“Remind why I’m the one who has to stay sober tonight?” Al asked as he sat at the bar with Louis and Scorpius, watching both of them down their third shot of firewhiskey in the past ten minutes, all of the empty glasses from the past hour laying in front of them.

Louis rolled his eyes as he signaled to Jessie, one of the bartenders, to bring them two more shots. “Because Scorp just went through a break up and my boyfriend is still off Merlin knows where in Albania or wherever,” he said, breaking off as Jessie slid he and Scorpius their shots. Al watched as Louis picked his up and downed it immediately. Ever since Lysander had finished his training as a curse breaker a few months back, he had been traveling more and more and even though he hid it well, Al could tell that Louis was starting to get annoyed at how much he was away.

“Besides,” Louis continued as if he hadn’t slipped up, “you lot didn’t want to invite Lyra to come with us, so someone has to drag our arses home if we get in trouble.”

“She’s working with the on call nurse tonight,” Scorpius pointed out, passing his still full shot glass between his hands. When Louis turned around to flag Jessie down yet again, Scorpius slid the glass across to Al without looking and Al quickly downed it, passing it back to him before Louis noticed.

“Oh, come on, Jessie, please,” Al heard Louis say and turned to see him leaning against the bar. Jessie just raised her eyebrow and continued to clean the glass in her hand.

“I’m under strict orders not to give you anything else for at least an hour,” she said, not looking at the boys, but Al could see the smile growing on her face. Jessie had only been hired a few weeks earlier, but she had already been proven capable of holding her own against the swarms of Wotters that always seemed to be at the Cowardly Hippogriff

“Who’s orders?” Louis challenged. Al hid a smile knowing exactly who it was that had cut them off and when he glanced over at Scorpius, he could see a grin spreading across his face.

“Do you really think you could come in here and I wouldn’t notice you trying to drink yourself into a coma?” James said to Louis as he walked over, handing drinks to the couple sitting next to their group. Al had to put his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing at the expression on Louis’ face.

Louis frowned, turning his attention from Jessie to James. “Oh, come on, it’s just a few more shots,” he said and Al heard Scorpius snort

“If you think I’m serving you anything else in the next hour,” James threatened as he grabbed the empty glasses in front of them and started to walk away.

“James, please,” Louis begged, following after him and knocking into quite a few people. Al chuckled and turned back to Scorpius. As he did so, he noticed the two glasses sitting in front of them and looked over to where Jessie was standing.

“There’s no alcohol in them. And your brother didn’t say to cut you two off,” she said with a smile, picking her rag up again and heading back down the bar. Al picked up the mug and looked at Scorpius who motioned that they should move to the tables beyond the dance floor. Al nodded and the two of them threaded their way through the crowd of people, leaving Louis behind to try to talk James out of his ban.

“So are you really okay with everything?” Al asked once they settled down in one of the booths, Scorpius taking a sip of his drink.

Scorpius shrugged, setting his glass down on the table. “Yeah, I mean, I guess it was going to happen eventually,” he said, tracing patterns in the condensation. When he noticed Al’s raised eyebrow, he continued, “It’s not like we expected to get married or anything. We got together in fourth year because we sort of liked spending time with each other and somehow it worked.”

He met Al’s suspicious gaze and rolled his own eyes. “Come on, Al. Did you really expect that we would have stayed together for four years? Honestly?”

_Well when you put it like that…_ To say it had been a surprise when Scorpius and Rose had gotten together halfway through their fourth year would have been an understatement. Sure, the two of them got along fine and would spend time together, but they had never seemed interested in each other beyond being friends. After the initial shock, it turned out that they had made quite a good couple, even if it had annoyed Al to no end at points (for more than one reason he had realized back in their fifth year).

Over the past year or so, though, he had noticed them spending less time together and reverting more towards the way they acted around each other before they had become a couple.  He had chalked it up to just adjusting to their new lives outside of school, but apparently it had been much more than that.

“But are you sure Rose didn’t say anything else about why?” he asked again, something still bothering him about it all. Scorpius shifted in his seat and looked down at the table, his hands gripped his glass tighter.

“Look, let’s not talk about, okay?” Scorpius said dismissively and Al was once again struck by how little he seemed to care about the breakup. He watched as Scorpius shifted in his seat once again, his hands finding their way to his blond hair yet again. Scorpius was nowhere near as tense as he had been when Al had seen him that afternoon, but there was something about his behavior that seemed familiar to Al. _I don’t think I’ve seen him this nervous since he and Rose…_ His thoughts trailed off as Scorpius met his gaze and suddenly, a lot of things clicked in Al’s mind.

Looking back at that night, he couldn’t say what they had actually talked about for the next few hours and he honestly couldn’t have cared less. Louis popped in eventually, but he disappeared the second he saw someone they had gone to school with. At some point Scorpius got up to get them more drinks and the two of them ended up sitting on the same side of the booth.

When Scorpius’s hand ended up on his while he was ranting about some idiot who had tried to rip off one of Uncle George’s products and pass it off as their own, he didn’t think anything of it. While Scorpius was telling him about one of the patients that he had met on his latest rounds, he didn’t give any indication that he felt their legs were touching under the table. And when he trailed off while talking about his latest plans of modifying Muggle devices to work with magic, he most certainly did not object to Scorpius’s lips meeting his own. 


End file.
